Announcing: Lucene.Net.Contrib

Whenever you start doing real-world stuff with Lucene you find yourself hacking and extending. That's the beauty of Lucene - it has so many extension points, and you can write almost every part of it from scratch to match your requirements.

Lately I've been working on some stuff relating to both RavenDB and HebMorph (separately...), and it became quite annoying keeping track of Lucene.Net extensions that are not part of the core project. In fact, several contrib packages (rather: projects) that are part of the original Lucene.Net project are hardly maintained and are not so friendly to use

So, I thought it was time to give all those a home. I created a new github repository called Lucene.Net.Contrib, where all those enhancements, large or small, should go. Once there's enough to go on, I'll create a nuget package and make it easily accessible.

Having a centralized location for all those has only benefits. Bugs can be found and fixed, a lot of time can be saved by just looking if someone has already ported or wrote stuff that you need, and the most important of all: finding new opportunities. Java Lucene has all that for quite some time now, and since I've been doing Lucene.Net a lot lately, I thought I'd give my small donation...

This is not trying to compete with Lucene.Net's contrib section, it is just intended in being much more flexible, fast growing community of extensions, most probably will be small in size.

What's currently there (not much - and only analysis/search related):

HTMLStripCharFilter - by plugging this to the analysis chain you can get any analyzer strip all HTML tags and take those positions into considerations (useful for later highlighting).

ReverseStringFilter - reverses a string; useful for cases where you need to allow leading wildcards and never trailing wildcards.

BinaryCoordSimilarity - Lucene Similarity configuration, which in a multi-word query scenario is punishing all results which do not contain ALL search terms.

Other stuff that is probably going to be included (or makes sense to):